Felix Yanwei Wang

I am an EECS PhD student at MIT, working with Julie Shah on learning from human demonstrations.

Before MIT, I did my MS in robotics at Northwestern University and researched with Todd Murphey and Mitra Hartmann on active sensing. I completed my undergraduate degree in physics at Middlebury College with Richard Wolfson.

Outside research, I enjoy theatre and backpacking. I thru-hiked PCT in 2019.

Email / Twitter

I'm interested in leveraging data-driven methods to make intelligent systems perform robustly in uncertain environments.

We present a continuous motion imitation method that can provably satisfy any discrete plan specified by a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula. Consequently, the imitator is robust to both task- and motion-level disturbances and guaranteed to achieve task success.

By learning how to pan, tilt and zoom its camera to focus on random crops of a noise image, an embodied agent can pick up navigation skills in realistically simulated environments.

We installed an interactive exhibition at MIT Museum that allows non-robot-experts to teach a robot an inspection task using demonstrations. The robustness and compliance of the learned motion policy enables visitors (including kids) to physically perturb the system safely 24/7 without losing a success gaurantee.

This research project studies the application of two information gain methods in a search problem: 1. Infotaxis - Search guided by entropy minimization 2. Ergodic exploration - Search guided by proportional coverage.

This research project studies how active sensing, i.e., choosing what data to collect, can improve data efficiency for decision-making under uncertainty. Inspired by the active whisking behavior of rats, we use simulated rat whisker sensory signals as a model for spatial-temporal data to learn policies that first collect observations and then classify object shapes.

This research project studies multi-agent distributed algorithms concerning coordination, segregation, and locomotion, with a hardware implementation of robust localization with cheap sensors on a low-cost underactuated system.

For my undergraduate physics thesis at Middlebury College, I did a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of Festo's Dual-Wing generator using COMSOL CFD package.

Miscellaneous class projects.

We compare the effectiveness of relaxation methods for warm starting trajectory optimization through soft contact.

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